God Shapes the Jewish People: 9:19-33

Welcome back to this third episode in Series 3. We are in Romans 9 and this episode will conclude our studies in this chapter but the two previous episodes are really important.

Recap and Background

Series 3 represents a major change in Paul’s theme in Romans; having focused on the nature of the gospel, the nature of salvation and the nature of the Christian life in Series 1 and Series 2, in chapter 9 he moves in a different direction and he starts dealing with a topic that was very important in the Roman church and in the Early Church. The question was, what is the place of the Jews? We are halfway through this discussion so I need to go back and look at some of the things that we have said in Episodes 1 and 2, in order to give context to what we are talking about here. Everybody recognizes that this is some of the most complicated language and reasoning that Paul uses in any of his letters.

I want to make sure that the main points are clear. There was a real crisis in the Early Church, and especially for those coming from a non-Jewish background, concerning the place of the Jews; they couldn’t easily understand why God’s chosen people - with all the privileges they had had rejected the Messiah, rejected the gospel, and turned against the apostles so forcefully in those early years. At the time that Paul is writing here, the overwhelming majority of Jews are totally opposed to the Christian message. The Church was easily tempted to think that God had finished with the Jewish people and their past and the Old Testament didn’t really matter anymore. Paul was determined to challenge this view. He believed it to be fundamentally wrong and dangerous. He wanted the Church to have a good understanding of what God had done in the Old Testament amongst the Jewish people and also to understand what God will do with the Jewish people in the future. As I have said in previous episodes in Series 3, once we get to Romans 11 Paul shows us something spectacular, remarkable and prophetic about what God is going to do amongst the Jewish people in future years - way beyond the lifetime of Paul.

In Episode 1, Paul outlined his heart for the Jewish people - his longing for them to be saved and he will say something very similar at the beginning of chapter 10. He also outlined in Episode 1, in Romans 9:1 – 5, all the incredible privileges that the Jews had: the covenants ,the Temple, the worship, the monarchy, the prophets, the patriarchs, the glory of God present within their nation, experienced by the people on many occasions and also the fact that the Messiah came from a Jewish background.

In Episode 2, Paul gives us a vital clue to understanding the situation of the Jews and that clue comes in Romans 9: 6. This is a vital verse and everything that follows in the chapter comes from the distinction that Paul makes in this verse,

“It is not as though God’s word had failed, for not all who are descended from Israel are Israel”

Romans 9:6, NIV

As I explained in the last episode, Paul is saying that we need to look beyond ethnicity and racial background. Not all Israel ethnically are Israel spiritually. Not all ethnic Jews follow God. Not all ethnic Jews have been saved. Not all ethnic Jews believed the Messiah when he came. Only a small number of people are the true Israel within the nation. He is introducing a concept of the ‘remnant’, a small part of the nation, and encouraging us to think about the Jewish people who truly followed God and work out the significance of them. Paul was one of those people. He believed the Messiah and he followed on into the new covenant when many other Jewish people said, “No we’re not willing to do that”. He introduced the idea that God was working within the nation, particularly with a small part of the nation, who were faithful to God in history and faithful to God by believing in the Messiah when Jesus came and the gospel was preached by the apostles. There is a distinction amongst the Jewish people. That distinction still exists today. I last visited Israel and Jerusalem a few years ago, and as you travel around the country, you can see a number of distinct types of Jewish people. There are those who are modern and secular people, like people in the Western World in particular; and there are there are those who are traditional Jews who still follow the Law of Moses - they are generally called Orthodox Jews; and then you can meet other Jewish people who are believing in Jesus. They would describe themselves as Messianic Jews. In Israel, there are people who are secular and many are atheists, there are those who are following the Old Testament in the old covenant and there are those who are following the Messiah. Not all ethnic Jews are following the Messiah. Today, two thousand years after Paul wrote this we can see the same pattern amongst the Jewish people.

The Potter and the Clay

Paul is anticipating further questions because he realises that people find it very hard to understand the concept that God chooses some people rather than others. God not only chose Israel but he chose those who were the faithful remnant within Israel.

“One of you will say to me: ‘Then why does God still blame us? For who is able to resist his will?’ But who are you, a human being to talk back to God? ‘Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’’ Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use?”

Romans 9:19-21, NIV

The questioner is asking, ‘How can God blame us for our decisions if he has already decided everything in advance anyway?’ Underlying Paul’s answer is the fact that he has already made clear, in the earlier chapters of Romans, that all people are sinners. We see in Romans 1, 2 and 3, Paul developing his argument that all types of people, in all types of situation have failed to respond to God and to obey him and to follow the revelation that they have been given. We are all under the power of sin. He sees sin as a spiritual force that controls our destiny. God is not obliged to bless us or to save us. It is of his grace if this happens. But how can he blame us for our decisions if he has decided everything in advance anyway? One answer to that is that we do not know enough to talk back to God, we don’t know his full purposes.

Paul makes an analogy here with the potter making different pots for different uses. There was much pottery made in ancient Israel; every community had someone skilled in this area. They used a potter’s wheel and clay was available and brought to make all sorts of different cups, plates and bowls. The potter could decide what kind of plate, bowl or cup he was making. It could be something beautiful and elegant for a rich man’s house or it could be a bowl from which the dogs and the animals drink. The potter had the choice to make whatever he wanted. Paul says God has the choice; he is sovereign. We are sinners and he is sovereign. So although we can talk back to God and question his judgment, ultimately he is able to make whatever decisions he wants about both offering salvation to people, and secondly the responsibilities that he gives them when they are believers. In human life, we often face the situation where we don’t know the full answer to a question when we challenge something. I remember when I was aged about eight, I was told by my parents that I was going to move from one school to another. I was very happy in the first school and it was just down the road from our house. I was told, ‘You’re going to move to a boarding school some way away and you are going to be with children you have never met before, with teachers you have never met before, and you are going to live away from home.’ I was questioning and totally against this decision because everything was going fine. But I couldn’t see what was in the mind of my parents in terms of the advantages that I might get from another school. I questioned something that I didn’t truly understand and it was only many years later that I began to see that it had been an advantage for me. We question God without really having all the knowledge of what his purposes are. Paul challenges the questioner by basically saying God ultimately can make whatever decisions he wants.

This brings us to think more specifically about God’s power and sovereignty. What emerges from Romans 9, 10 and 11 is a very clear understanding that God has a strategy throughout human history to bring the gospel to as many people as possible. Within this strategy, as we have seen from some of the examples that Paul has given in the last episode, God makes choices; he chooses this person rather than that person; he chooses Isaac rather than Ishmael, he chooses Jacob rather than Esau, he chooses the nation of Israel rather than the Canaanites or other surrounding nations. So God can choose the instruments that he is going to use to bring salvation to the world.

God’s Choice or Man’s Choice?

Another theme is about the question of who is saved, and who is not saved. Is that a matter purely for God’s choice? The way that Paul describes this suggests to us that there are two elements in the salvation of an individual person. The first and most important element is God’s initiative. Earlier on, he describes in Romans 8: 29 that ‘God foreknew us and predestined us to be conformed to the image of his son and he called us and justified us’. This suggests that in the salvation of a believer God makes the first move - we can’t understand the gospel and understand God fully purely just by reading in a book, or thinking it through, or looking at the Bible. We need his help; he initiates the process. But when he calls us, there is a responsibility for us to respond. That is where our will and decision comes in. We have to respond to the initiative of God. That is the balance that Paul brings us in terms of God’s sovereignty in our salvation.

When people tell their story about becoming a Christian, you will almost always see two elements in the story, if they tell the story fully. First of all, they will tell the story of how things began to happen, how they felt God speaking to them in some way: an initiative from God came through the Bible, a dream, a vision, the testimony of a Christian friend, a circumstance that happened, a new thought that came to their mind. Then they will tell the story of their response. We understand our salvation to have two elements; God’s initiative and our response. How they fit together can sometimes be a bit mysterious to us but it starts according to Paul in Romans 8 and 9 with God’s initiative and God’s sovereignty. He doesn’t owe us salvation. We are sinners, we need his help but he reaches out to us and we must respond.

A Remnant Will be Saved

Romans 9:22 - 29.

Paul is talking about the history of the Jewish people in the Old Testament and some of the difficult circumstances that happened and the division between the majority of the nation and the faithful remnant.

“What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath - prepared for destruction? What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory - even us, whom he also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles? As he says in Hosea: ‘I will call them ‘my people’ who are not my people; and I will call her ‘my loved one’ who is not my loved one,’ and, in the very place where it was said to them, ‘You’re not my people’, they will be called ‘children of the living God’.’ Isaiah cries out concerning Israel: ‘Though the number of the Israelites be like the sand of the sea, only the remnant will be saved. For the Lord will carry out his sentence on earth with speed and finality.’ It is just as Isaiah said previously: ‘Unless the Lord Almighty had left us descendants, we would have become like Sodom, we would have been like Gomorrah.’”

Romans 9:22-29, NIV

When Paul quotes verses from the Old Testament as he does here, we always have to think of the story behind the quotation in order to understand his thinking. Paul is thinking about a period of Jewish history of great difficulty and suffering where the nation was divided between an unbelieving majority and a small faithful remnant. This story is the story of how the Jewish people in the land of Israel began to be very rebellious against God in the time of the Jewish kings that ruled for several hundred years, from the time of Saul, David and Solomon - the first three kings. Paul is thinking about this period of history and remembering in his mind the fact that despite the fact that God had promised them the whole land, had given them a law to obey, promised he would protect them in the land and that they could stay there permanently if they obeyed him, things began to go badly wrong. They began to go wrong in the time of King David and then King Solomon, when the kingdom was well established, became a significant sinner. He rebelled against God and disobeyed him in many different ways.

God decided that he would divide the kingdom into two - a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom: the northern kingdom called Israel, the southern kingdom called Judah. That was an act of judgement.

Then they continued to be rebellious over the next decades. God judged them again and the northern kingdom was invaded by a foreign nation called Assyria, and the nation was destroyed and the people were taken into exile. Just over a hundred years later the southern kingdom of Judah was invaded by another kingdom, the kingdom of Babylon, the Empire of the day. Their king, King Nebuchadnezzar, personally organized the invasion of the country and decided he would destroy the kingdom of Judah. He went to the capital city Jerusalem with his army, besieged it, invaded it, destroyed it, destroyed the Temple, destroyed the royal palace, destroyed all the buildings and exiled the people. Most of the people fled from the land. This was a terrible disaster. Yet seventy years later God allowed many of those people to come back into the land. They came back to Jerusalem, back to Judah and started building the nation again.

All the way through this period of time of great rebellion and terrible national failure, there was a faithful remnant, and this was the point that Paul is making here. A remnant of Jewish people believed in God and obeyed him, and wanted his purposes in their lives and in their country. The point that Paul is making is that even though there was total destruction the remnant continued to believe in God. When they came back to the land, the remnant of faithful Jews were there in the land all the way through the centuries up until the time of Christ.

In Romans 9, Paul has taken examples of the history of Israel from the very beginning, from the time of Abraham, Isaac and Sarah all the way through towards the end of Jewish history before Jesus came. Paul has shown from Romans 9:6 that not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. That the ethnic Israel is not the same as the spiritual Israel, and that we need to keep our eyes - not on the failures of the nation - but on the faithfulness of the remnant; because God is going to work through those people. He is encouraging his listeners and readers not to write off the Jews because they failed as a nation in many ways but to remember there is a faithful remnant there who God is going to use in the future.

Righteousness by Faith

Paul then concludes this chapter in

“What then shall we say? That the Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness have obtained it, a righteousness that is by faith; but the people of Israel have pursued the law as a way of righteousness, have not attained their goal. Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith but as if it were by works. They stumbled over the stumbling stone. As it is written: ‘See, I lay in Zion a stone that causes people to stumble and a rock that makes them fall, and the one who believes in him will never be put to shame.’”

Romans 9:30-33, NIV

Most Jews resisted the gospel when it came. They stumbled but God used this on purpose, Paul says in verse 24, to create a new people. This is the people that the Roman church represent, where there is the faithful Jewish remnant right there in the middle. They believed in the Messiah and then a Gentile crowd is being added in. That is the process that is going on in front of their eyes in Rome. Paul says, ‘Don’t write off the Jewish remnant because God has longer-term purposes for the Jews that are far bigger than we might realise.’ He will reveal those in Romans 11.

As we come to the end of this complex chapter we all recognise that this is some of the most complex discussion and teaching that Paul gives anywhere in his letters.

Reflections

In conclusion, by way of reflection we have learned that God has a big plan of salvation. That not all of ethnic Israel is saved, only a remnant, but the remnant is significant. We have learned that God is building a new people of all nations, the Church. We have also learned that we are all responsible for how we respond to God’s calling on our lives. We have learned that God has not yet finished with the Jews. Therefore we must avoid anti-Semitism, and we must pay attention to the Old Testament. It still speaks to us today. It is part of God’s Word and part of the whole story of salvation.